Slang, yo.

14Jan

It is interesting how powerful slang can be. Just walking around, we hear slang words and phrases everywhere. It is quite common. However, we generally only hear it. When we read it in a newspaper or somewhere, it looks out-of-place.

When slang starts to appear in places and gets treated like a normal word, both written and spoken, then I may worry. Why is slang so powerful and influential to the spoken and written word?

But the more important question: Do we want to be known by our slang, by words that are only understood by other people within our country, or do we want to sound more professional and intelligent?

I do use slang, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of the slang I don’t use, because it just sounds… ugly. Why change something beautiful like language? Why butcher it to something that is unrecognizable? I have heard slang in my different countries and even in different languages. Here is an example:

When I first started learning Spanish, I wanted to learn because I thought it one of the most beautiful languages spoken. I still believe that. It has a magic about it that makes the tongue move like a dance. Exquisite. When I started meeting people from Spanish-speaking countries and travelling to those countries, I found that I got lost in a lot of the language. I was hearing a completely different language. That was because I had never learned the slang. But this Spanish was not beautiful to my ear. It was messy and rough, not the poetry that I dreamed of. It disappointed me greatly.

My point is this: Why do we let slang rule our language? Why does it make us so comfortable? Since when does using beautiful words together in a sentence make you sound “old-fashioned” or a “know-it-al”? Since when did we compromise our knowledge?